Page 39

I shake my head. “Nothing like that, I don’t think. The place was a rental, and then seems like they got by the skin of their teeth on a lot of other stuff, odd jobs and petty shit. They didn’t seem like the type to have a bunch of valuables socked away, if that’s what you’re asking. Like, as far as I can tell, the only thing they owned outright was Bananarama Bonzai here.” I tap the paper ruefully and give a small sigh. Zuzu looks totally puzzled.

“It’s the dog,” I say. “A greyhound. Nana. Remember? She used to be a racer, apparently.”

Zuzu considers. “Racing dogs are like horses?” she asks. “You know, worth a lot, you breed for money or something? Is that why all the numbers?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I say. “I guess we could look it up.” I pull my phone out of my pocket. Maybe these dogs are worth something. I mean, I don’t actually think that someone would have gone to the lengths of murdering two men in cold blood over a greyhound, but my curiosity in Nana—sorry, Bananarama’s—pedigree is piqued.

It takes a little googling, as I slump over my mai tai, tiny straw in my mouth, to find the sporting dog registry. But it’s a surprisingly well-organized site once I get there.

“Sick fucks,” Zuzu mutters over my shoulder, “making those poor things work so hard. It’s like cockfighting. Let people fight, I say. I’ll take on anyone for a few bucks, and win.” She grins.

“I don’t doubt it,” I say dryly, chewing my straw. I glance down at the paper and carefully thumb in Nana’s ID number, then press enter. Sure enough, it spins up a record of her ownership, including her date of birth. She’s four years old and change, I notice, and her owner…

Darling, Michelangelo.

“Michelangelo?” Zuzu says, her eyebrows shooting up. “Like the artist?”

“No, like the ninja turtle,” I deadpan. I glance back at Wendy’s crib sheet and tap it: Michael Darling, age 27. “Guess that’s his full name? So her older brother bought the dog.”

And that’s about all I get here. The rest of the little screen is thin on information. Wendy was right when she said that Nana had never raced, because her win-loss records are all blank, and besides notations about her coat (sandy brindle) and her weight (twenty-nine pounds, a real runt), there’s really not much else.

“Yeah,” I say, after scanning it. “I don’t think this was much of a motive. She’s just a dog.”

“But a very cute dog,” Zuzu says, batting her eyes. She slurps down the rest of her vodka and signals in Diamond’s general direction to attract her for another.

I breathe out hard. I don’t know why I thought this would be easy. I’m not sure I did think it would be easy, but I certainly didn’t think it would be just stupid dead ends.

Idly, I notice that Darling, Michelangelo is underlined in blue—a hyperlink. So I tap it, which loads up a whole new page. All of the dogs associated with that owner, it seems, and there are a lot of them.

Like, upwards of ten, or—no, I realize there’s only ten results visible at a time. There’s actually⁠—

“Holy shit,” I mutter under my breath as Diamond appears with Zuzu’s refill. “Michelangelo Darling owned a lot of dogs.”

“No shit?” Zuzu glances at Diamond, who seems to have briefly frozen.

“Um, s-sorry,” Diamond stammers, and awkwardly sets down the vodka, a tiny bit slipping over the edge of the glass and spilling. “There you go.”

Zuzu nods and accepts it before looking back at my phone. “Damn. Maybe he had some kind of scheme going on. A bunch of them to pull a sleigh or something.”

“Maybe,” I say. I tap through the results. They’re sorted alphabetically by dog name—Adams Apple Pie. Aerosmith World Tour. Agreeable Atmosphere—practical word salads.

Nana’s the only one that seems to have made it home as a pet, and yet…

“Hang on.” I push both thumbs against my screen and pull to zoom in. “That’s…” I look at the date column, tap the down arrow to sort from most recent on the “date acquired” field. July twenty-eighth, July fifteenth, July second. “Those are…”

I do the math in my head, even though I barely have to, and set my phone down in disbelief.

“What?” Zuzu says. “Those are what?”

“Those dates are after he was killed,” I say under my breath, almost not wanting to believe it. “I mean, I’m not crazy, right? Like it definitely says that Michelangelo Darling bought those dogs on those dates, right?” I hold up the screen, maybe half an inch from Zuzu’s face, so she has to push me back a little to look at it clearly.

She frowns, then nods. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, it would appear so.” A little sparkle lights up her eyes. “But what does it mean?”

“You tell me!” I cry. “You’re supposed to be the criminal underworld expert.”

“About dogs?” she says. “This, I know nothing. But,” she adds, reconsidering, “it maybe makes my theory make sense of earlier.”

My rum-soggy brain takes a moment to compute what she’s just said. “Your theory?”